


burnt-out taste

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Smoking, Unconvincing Descriptions of Automotive Repair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 14:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6857944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s hot,” is all he says, and when he looks at you, you get a sudden feeling of <i>other</i> from him, that he knows more than he lets on, that he bends to Kavinsky’s will for reasons beyond youth and pack mentality, that there are as many ghosts lurking behind his pale stare as there are behind yours. It lasts a second, and then it’s gone, and he’s another boy in a half-shredded tee with scabs on his knees and his skin still spoiled from the night before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	burnt-out taste

**Author's Note:**

> It's [f0x-meets-w0lf's](http://f0x-meets-w0lf.tumblr.com/) birthday so I finally wrote the Adam/Proko that we were talking about, like, a month ago :V whoops _pls enjoy_
> 
> [you will never guess who beta'd](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/)

You don’t get a lot of Aglionby boys at Boyd’s. At first that surprised you, given what Ronan says about how they drive, but then you’d learned that Aglionby boys have two solutions for automotive trouble – send back to Germany for repairs, or get a new car. They don’t trust _you_ with their machines. Your customers are locals, and you get the problems that they couldn’t fix themselves. The exceptions are Gansey, a handful of students who seem to think letting you fix their cars is the equivalent of buying local, and Prokopenko.

The first time, you assume he’s lost, though that might just be the impression he gives off. His eyes skip over where you’re working on an old Civic, check the sign like he’s making sure he actually found a mechanic, and then his attention wanders slowly back to you. There’s no one else outside – it’s the kind of sticky-hot that means Boyd stays in the little air-conditioned office – so you drag a cloth over the worst of the oil on your fingers and approach his window.

“Hi,” you say, not acknowledging that you go to the same school and he’s sitting in a car worth more than you are. “Do you need repairs?”

“Oil change,” he says, words slow and dragging through the stagnant air. He’s following the instructions of a dashboard light, and you bite the inside of your mouth because telling him he could do that himself is bad for business. “You can do that?”

“Yeah, I can do that now. You can wait inside, if you want,” you tell him. You move back while he drops out of the car, but he just goes to lean against the side of the garage, a little square of cracked concrete and scrub grass that the sun has been working over all afternoon. You think he’s trying to watch you work, but he lights a cigarette and tips his head back, staring at absolutely nothing, not even looking over when you pop his hood.

You don’t care. It’s preferable to the Aglionby boys who want to pretend they know shit about how engines work and get underfoot, and it’s preferable to the locals who’ve loved their trucks for thirty years and huff about how you’re handling the insides. You check the oil levels, and you work out what replacement fluid you need, and if you think about Prokopenko it’s just to hope that Kavinsky doesn’t come to pick him up.  

His phone starts buzzing, but he doesn’t pick up. You glance over your shoulder at him, after a solid minute of demanding, muted vibration, but Prokopenko’s paying his phone as much mind as he does anything else. He takes a long drag of his cigarette and he watches the dirt between his feet, and you wish he’d just turn it off if he wasn't going to pick up. 

Oil changes don't take long. He pays with a bill that you have to break because he might be Prokopenko but he’s still an Aglionby boy, and he says ‘thanks’ with the same detachment he had when he arrived. It’s not insincere, though. You nod to him and return to the Civic, and he slides back into his Golf, and you hear the hum of his phone again. He picks up, one hand on the wheel, and you hear, “Hey, K,” before he drives off.

He’s a regular after that. Ronan told you that Kavinsky’s cars are fake, but not what that meant. You can’t find anything fake about the Golf. Prokopenko brings it to you with the headlights shattered, with the whole front corner caved in, with the upholstery singed and the windscreen cracked, and you’d ask what he’s doing to it if you didn’t already know. You’d been saving for your own car before you’d set your sights on Aglionby; you can’t imagine being carless enough to play games with it.

But Prokopenko doesn’t offer either apology or explanation. He hangs outside the garage while you work, and he smokes and ignores his phone and lets the light trickle over him. Aside from silently willing him to mute his phone, you find you don’t mind his presence; there’s no hint of clashing violence to him on his own. He’s just quiet. You don’t actually know many quiet people.

The first time he talks to you, you’re too busy fixing his flat tire to notice, and the realization he spoke presents itself to you a moment too late. You crane your neck to see him, and he’s watching you as distantly as ever, smoke spilling from his fingers. “Sorry?” you ask.

“I said, you work a lot.” He doesn’t say it like it’s a revelation, which wins him points over Gansey.

You’re pretty sure that there’s no version of this conversation you haven’t already had, so you just say, “Yeah.” His eyes are soft blue and hazy, and he nods like he wasn’t expecting much from you. It’s late afternoon and you’re tired and hot and bored and you say, “You wreck your car a lot.”

The corners of his lips curl up, and he says, “Yeah,” like he knows it’s terrible but he’s not going to stop. The sound of his phone is more familiar to you than the sound of your own, and he thumbs the corner protruding from his pocket, doesn’t answer. “It’s lucky you can keep fixing it, or I’d have to take one of K’s cars.”

There’s a distinction there you don’t understand the edges of, and then the moment’s gone and he’s looking somewhere far away and you’ve got your arms full of replacement rubber and you need to focus. If you want more – and you don’t know if you do, you just know that he’s soft in a way that calls to every part of you that’s jagged and raw and tired – then you forfeit your chance for it.

It’s a little different after that. You pass him at Aglionby, where he trails in Kavinsky’s wake and makes no effort to free himself from the undertow. He looks at you and he smiles, small and gentle, and then Ronan will yell at Kavinsky or Kavinsky will yell at Ronan and Gansey will murmur something quiet and judgemental that he expects you to agree with, and there won’t be any space left for you to look at Prokopenko. He disappears between his louder friends, and at Aglionby you live somewhere in Gansey and Ronan’s shadows. If either of them ever mention him, it’s a footnote in a book about Kavinsky. It has the inverse effect of making you pay him more attention, of thinking more about what Prokopenko is when he’s on his own.

“Okay,” you say the next time he comes to the garage, “What did you hit?”

The entire front corner is crumpled like foil. “The Mitsu,” he tells you, and there is something a little more wicked in the edge of his smile, the memory of a game he actually enjoyed. You still can’t imagine it.

“And I guess Kavinsky just got a new one.” You don’t hide your contempt, and Prokopenko doesn’t care that you don’t even try to, and this time he hovers closer while you work, breathing out billowing clouds that you cover your nose from. His phone’s incessant demands still play in the background, but you think you get it; turning it off would be too active. Letting it ring is the closest Prokopenko gets to refusing Kavinsky anything. He seems incapable of it. It annoys you more than you think it should.  

He shows up with hickeys, and you show up with bruises, and you look at each other, silent agreement set and sealed before he’s even out of his car. He sees enough people with black eyes to make yours unremarkable, surely, and he does an admirable job of not staring at you with that mix of pained regret you’ve learned to hate.

You have a harder time not looking at him. You don’t think you’ve ever seen anyone marked so possessively, ripe purple bruises bitten down the length of this throat, red-rimmed and tender, impossible to ignore. You get lost in imagining Kavinsky’s teeth on him, until you drift up and meet his eyes, soft and clear until you lose him through a long exhale of smoke. You get to work. You don’t stop thinking about it.

You’re reattaching his wing mirror, which means you get to retreat around the side of his car to work in the shade. There’s a radio playing, but it’s Boyd’s kind of music which means not yours and not Prokopenko’s, but it fills the background well enough. Even in the shade, you need to stop to wipe your forehead, slick fingers slipping over the mangled plastic of the crushed mirror. The sound of footsteps circling the car has you tensing, just a little, and then Prokopenko drops down beside you, leans back against the rear tire.

“It’s hot,” is all he says, and when he looks at you, you get a sudden feeling of _other_ from him, that he knows more than he lets on, that he bends to Kavinsky’s will for reasons beyond youth and pack mentality, that there are as many ghosts lurking behind his pale stare as there are behind yours. It lasts a second, and then it’s gone, and he’s another boy in a half-shredded tee with scabs on his knees and his skin still spoiled from the night before.

You fix his wing mirror. He watches you until his cigarette burns down and he has to grind the rest into the concrete. “Do you want to go somewhere?” he asks.

It’s the end of your shift. You’re tired and you’d like to shower, clear oil and sweat from your skin, but this is Prokopenko and the only way he’s ever seen you and you’re not sure it matters. “Go where?”

It’s vaguely surreal to be inside the Golf instead of out of it. Proko turns the air con up high and keeps the windows wound down and you bite your tongue very hard to keep yourself from pointing that out. His phone drones. He turns it off.

He takes you to the skate park, where you haven’t been since middle school, cracked concrete deserted under the relentless heat, late afternoon shadows making deep hollows around the ramps. You look to see if you can pick Noah’s name out of any faded graffiti, but you can’t, and you sit beside Prokopenko on a concrete monument to youth. There’s something very Henrietta about the place, amplified by Prokopenko, quiet and soft, dusty and chipped. It reminds you of long afternoons hanging out with the boys from the public school, not quite friends, passing the time before you couldn’t avoid going home, and the fissure between your sepia memories and the exhausting fractures of your present fill you with fatigue. You say, “You don’t really seem like you belong with Kavinsky.”

It’s a lie. Prokopenko absolutely belongs with Kavinsky, he fits in with the rest of the dogs like he was bred to be there, he’s as much fire and gasoline as the rest of them. It’s just that he seems like he could belong somewhere else, too. Somewhere quiet. He knows it, and he knows what you mean, and he gives you one of his gentle, curling smiles. He says, “You don’t really seem like you belong with Gansey.”

It burns. You surge to your feet, and he follows you up, and maybe he didn’t mean it like you assume he does, like you assume everyone does, but when he tries to catch your arm you pull away.

“Wait,” he says, grabbing for you again and snagging you by the wrist. You try to drag yourself free, but he follows, closing the distance between you. “I just meant – you’re _real_.”

“ _He’s_ real,” you snap, but Prokopenko just shrugs. Maybe he thinks Gansey has the same mythical status as Kavinsky, the kind you need to get so close to see beneath. Maybe he’s just heard too much about Gansey and Lynch, and you’re the footnote, you’re the one he thinks he actually knows. He still hasn’t let go of you. You set your hand over his, ready to pry his fingers loose, but he tightens his grip on you, eyes entreating.

He relaxes when you do, releasing you when you won’t go farther than one step, rubbing your temples and trying to pick through the mess of what you’re doing. You want to ask why he turned his phone off. When you look back at him, he’s got his head tipped back, like he’s watching the sky, except his eyes are on you and the deep pattern of bites over his throat feels very deliberately exposed. The reality of them sinks into you again, how _owned_ and how content with it Prokopenko seems to be. You hate it, and something in his gaze is daring you to hate it. Again, you get the sense that he’s more than the loyal creature he makes a show of being.

Heat and exhaustion swim through your thoughts, and you have spent months not touching him when you have wanted to. You slide a hand up his neck, the oil under your nails a match for the bruises over him. You have never been quite close enough to notice before, but he’s spattered with freckles, a childhood of sunshine that somehow led him to where he is now. His expression’s a dare, his mouth too soft and waiting. You think, _just once_ , and you kiss him.

He tastes like tobacco and ash and bloody cracked lips, and it’s not the best thing, but when you’re done he presses his forehead against yours while he exhales and the peace of it swallows you. He’s undemanding, holds you by the shoulders, and you try not to sag against him because it’s easier than you thought it could be. Without opening your eyes, you know he’s smiling.

When you move back the shadows have shifted, made long standing stones out of you both, and Proko turns to stare at nothing, transmission shorting out once again. “Drop me back in town before you meet up with K,” you tell him, in case his priorities get askew.

The drive back is quiet, him tapping his fingers to a song that’s not playing, you busy with the buzz of your own thoughts. He sets you back down in front of Boyd’s, and evening has stolen the heat from the yard, made it feel like a different place to the one you left. Prokopenko pulls out his phone before you’ve left the car, and you linger, just for a second, before you get your bike. “Sorry, K,” he says, eyes sliding over you and the garage and then the long empty road beyond.

He’s pulled out of the lot before you’ve reached your bike. At school, he still smiles, and at the garage, he smokes beside you, but no matter how obscene the trail of teeth on him gets, neither of you suggest moving elsewhere. The bites say _not yours_ , and Prokopenko’s lazy acceptance says _not going to be yours_ and you have school and work and dead kings and not enough time for any of it. What you get is the memory of your _just once_ and pale eyes over-bright on you when you fix his alternator and the very occasional warmth of his fingers trailing through yours. He breaks his car too often, and he doesn’t listen when you try to teach him how to do it himself.

You struggle to mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! I'd love to hear what you thought! I'm also over on [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) come yell at me about raven boys


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